4

American Life in the

Seventeenth Century

1607–1692
Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles
before in their preparation . . . , they had now no friends
to wellcome them, nor inns to entertaine or refresh their
weatherbeaten bodys, no houses or much less towns
to repaire too, to seeke for succore.

A s the seventeenth century unfolded, the crude en-

campments of the fi rst colonists slowly gave way to
permanent settlements. Durable and distinctive ways
off the life expectancy of newcomers from Eng land.
Half the people born in early Virginia and Maryland
did not survive to celebrate their twentieth birthdays.
of life emerged as Europeans and Africans adapted to Few of the remaining half lived to see their fi ftieth—or
the New World and as Native Americans adapted to the even their fortieth, if they were women.
newcomers. Even the rigid doctrines of Puritanism The disease-ravaged settlements of the Chesapeake
softened somewhat in response to the circumstances grew only slowly in the seventeenth century, mostly
of life in America. And though all the colonies remained through fresh immigration from Eng land. The great
tied to Eng land, and all were stitched tightly into the majority of immigrants were single men in their late
fabric of an Atlantic economy, regional differences con- teens and early twenties, and most perished soon after
tinued to crystallize, notably the increasing impor- arrival. Surviving males competed for the affections of
tance of slave labor to the southern way of life. the extremely scarce women, whom they outnumbered
nearly six to one in 1650 and still outnumbered by three
to two at the end of the century. Eligible women did not
The Unhealthy Chesapeake remain single for long.
Families were both few and fragile in this fero-
Life in the American wilderness was nasty, brutish, and cious environment. Most men could not fi nd mates.
short for the earliest Chesapeake settlers. Malaria, dys- Most marriages were destroyed by the death of a part-
entery, and typhoid took a cruel toll, cutting ten years ner within seven years. Scarcely any children reached

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 69

adulthood under the care of two parents, and almost

no one knew a grandparent. Weak family ties were re-
flected in the many pregnancies among unmarried
young girls. In one Maryland county, more than a third
of all brides were already pregnant when they wed.
Yet despite these hardships, the Chesapeake colo-
nies struggled on. The native-born inhabitants eventu-
ally acquired immunity to the killer diseases that had
ravaged the original immigrants. The presence of more
women allowed more families to form, and by the end
of the seventeenth century the white population of the
Chesapeake was growing on the basis of its own birth-
rate. As the eighteenth century opened, Virginia, with
some fi fty-nine thousand people, was the most popu-
lous colony. Maryland, with about thirty thousand, was
the third largest (after Massachusetts).

The Tobacco Economy

Although unhealthy for human life, the Chesapeake

was immensely hospitable to tobacco cultivation.
Profit-hungry settlers often planted tobacco to sell be-
fore they planted corn to eat. But intense tobacco cul-
tivation quickly exhausted the soil, creating a nearly
insatiable demand for new land. Relentlessly seeking
fresh fields to plant in tobacco, commercial growers
plunged ever farther up the river valleys, provoking Early Tobacco Advertising
ever more Indian attacks.
Leaf-laden ships annually hauled some 1.5 million
pounds of tobacco out of Chesapeake Bay by the 1630s
and almost 40 million pounds a year by the end of the
century. This enormous production depressed prices,
but colonial Chesapeake tobacco growers responded to More tobacco meant more labor, but where was it
falling prices in the familiar way of farmers: by plant- to come from? Families procreated too slowly to pro-
ing still more acres to tobacco and bringing still more vide it by natural population increase. Indians died too
product to market. quickly on contact with whites to be a reliable labor
force. African slaves cost too much money. But Eng land
still had a “surplus” of displaced workers and farmers,
desperate for employment. Many of them were young
men who had fled the disastrous slump in the cloth
trades that hit Eng land in the early seventeenth cen-
tury. Others were tenants who had been forced from
their modest farms when landlords “enclosed” ever
“ more acreage for sheep grazing. Making their way
from town to town in search of wages, they eventually
drifted into port cities like Bristol and London. There
they boarded ship for America as indentured ser-
vants, voluntarily mortgaging the sweat of their bodies
for several years (usually four to seven) to Chesapeake

” masters. In exchange they received transatlantic pas-

sage and eventual “freedom dues,” including an ax and

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70 4 American Life in the Seventeenth Century, 1607–1692

a hoe, a few barrels of corn, a suit of clothes, and per- miserable that man is that governs a people where six
haps a small parcel of land. parts of seven at least are poor, endebted, discontented,
Both Virginia and Maryland employed the head- and armed.”
right system to encourage the importation of servant Berkeley’s misery soon increased. About a thou-
workers. Under its terms, whoever paid the passage of a sand Virginians broke out of control in 1676, led by a
laborer received the right to acquire fi fty acres of land. twenty-nine-year-old planter, Nathaniel Bacon. Many
Masters—not the servants themselves—thus reaped of the rebels were frontiersmen who had been forced
the benefits of landownership from the headright sys- into the untamed backcountry in search of arable
tem. Some masters, men who already had at least mod- land. They fiercely resented Berkeley’s friendly poli-
est fi nancial means, soon parlayed their investments in cies toward the Indians, whose thriving fur trade the
servants into vast holdings in real estate. They became governor monopolized. When Berkeley refused to re-
the great merchant-planters, lords of sprawling river- taliate against a series of brutal Indian attacks on fron-
front estates that came to dominate the agriculture and tier settlements, Bacon and his followers took matters
commerce of the southern colonies. Ravenous for both into their own hands. They fell murderously upon the
labor and land, Chesapeake planters brought some Indians, friendly and hostile alike, chased Berkeley
100,000 indentured servants to the region by 1700. from Jamestown, and put the torch to the capital. Chaos
These “white slaves” represented more than three- swept the raw colony, as frustrated freemen and re-
quarters of all European immigrants to Virginia and sentful servants—described as “a rabble of the basest
Maryland in the seventeenth century. sort of people”—went on a rampage of plundering and
Indentured servants led a hard but hopeful life in pilfering.
the early days of the Chesapeake settlements. They As this civil war in Virginia ground on, Bacon sud-
looked forward to becoming free and acquiring land denly died of disease, like so many of his fellow colo-
of their own after completing their term of servitude. nists. Berkeley thereupon crushed the uprising with
But as prime land became scarcer, masters became brutal cruelty, hanging more than twenty rebels. Back
increasingly resistant to including land grants in “free- in Eng land Charles II complained, “That old fool has
dom dues.” The servants’ lot grew harsher as the sev- put to death more people in that naked country than I
enteenth century wore on. Misbehaving servants, such did here for the murder of my father.”
as a housemaid who became pregnant or a laborer who
killed a hog, might be punished with an extended term
of ser vice. Even after formal freedom was granted, pen-
niless freed workers often had little choice but to hire
themselves out for pitifully low wages to their former
masters.
“
Frustrated Freemen and
Bacon’s Rebellion
An accumulating mass of footloose, impoverished free-
men drifted discontentedly about the Chesapeake re-
”
gion by the late seventeenth century. Mostly single
young men, they were frustrated by their broken hopes
of acquiring land, as well as by their gnawing failure to
“
fi nd single women to marry.
The swelling numbers of these wretched bachelors
rattled the established planters. The Virginia assembly
in 1670 disfranchised most of the landless knockabouts,
accusing them of “having little interest in the country”
and causing “tumults at the election to the disturbance
of his majesty’s peace.” Virginia’s Governor William
Berkeley lamented his lot as ruler of this rabble: “How ”
Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
 egal documents, such as this contract signed in
Virginia in 1746, not only provide evidence about
the ever-changing rules by which societies have
regulated their affairs, but also furnish rich infor-
mation about the conditions of life and the terms of
human relationships in the past. This agreement be-
tween Thomas Clayton and James Griffi n provides a
reminder that not all indentured servants in early
America came from abroad. Indentured servitude
could be equivalent to an apprenticeship, in which
a young person traded several years of ser vice to a
master in exchange for instruction in the master’s
craft. Here Clayton pledges himself to five years in
Griffi n’s employ in return for a promise to initiate the
young man into the “Mystery” of the master’s craft.
Why might the master’s trade be described as a
“mystery”? From the evidence of this contract, what
are the principal objectives of each of the parties to
it? What problems does each anticipate? What obli-
gations does each assume? What does the consent of
Clayton’s mother to the contract suggest about the
young man’s situation?

71
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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
I

Yoked and bound, these men, women, and children were on their way to a coastal slave
market, where they would be herded aboard ship for the Americas.

72
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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
73